Monthly Archives: March 2015

When I loaded up Creatures 2 for the day, I decided to make this run more wolfling in nature. I found the Creatures too stubborn or unintelligent and it was a terrible strain on my patience. That said, this group stuck together so it made monitoring them very simple.

Unfortunately, they didn’t always do a great job tending their needs and often looked unhappy.

Eventually, Dodger took the lift up to the first powerup and I coaxed him into pressing it. For a while, he only tried to “get” and “run” from it, but things eventually worked out. For a little while, anyway.

Eventually, and seemingly out of the blue, Ernest died at 1 hour, 11 minutes. Though I’d found the science kit, I wasn’t actually able to use it to figure out what was wrong with Ernest. Perhaps a glitch? The game wasn’t running smoothly for me anyway, so I used the game state controller to fix things. Unfortunately, the trick didn’t work and Ernest floated up into the sky. I still had no idea what happened to him.

Grub was settling in with the horde now but David didn’t seem to be a fan of his complaining. It was still nice to see our Grendel getting along with the rest of the group, and I was glad he was there.

When it came to our oldest lady, Cassy, food was still an issue. She was so distracted by Danny that she didn’t even look at the food that I was offering her. I didn’t have all day and she wasn’t in danger of starving just yet, so I decided to leave her alone. Danny was busy trying to sleep and enjoy a drink, so I wasn’t worried about them breeding, anyway.

Speaking of breeding, Mallory got pregnant! Look at that big, happy smile! To celebrate, she found a ball and started playing with it. How cute! I hope her baby is as clever when it comes to managing boredom. I wanted to try something out with my next baby anyway. A tooltip suggested that boredom management might be important for a norn’s brain’s health, so one of the first things I’ll be teaching, after “push food” will be “push toy”. It’s an idea, and we’ll see how it works.

In due time, Peony laid her egg, and thankfully, she wasn’t hard to feed so long as other Norns weren’t around. Before long, she was crowded and I couldn’t get her to eat another bite. At least her health danced around 75%. Basically, I had nothing to worry about. She even smiled, and often! With her new egg, that put our egg counter at 6. With no babies in the import queue, this made things very easy to

I still had to worry about Cassy and Danny’s deteriorating health, however. With the pair secluded from the other norns, it wasn’t too hard to feed Cassy, but Danny was still a challenge. Thankfully, a quick slap on the rump was all it eventually took. Peony, still recovering from her pregnancy was the only challenge I had now. Of course, as surrounded by norns as she was now, it seemed like I had no hope feeding her!

I had to isolate her on the western dock before she would finally eat. It meant separating her from all the other norns, but for the sake of her health, I would argue that the hassle was worth it.

Finally, once everyone was healthy and happy, I could look forward to the next egg without any worry or stress. David was our oldest now and didn’t even have grey hair yet, so not only was there no cause to introduce a new norn right away, but I didn’t have to worry about anyone dying of old age for a while. Not a bad scene to come back to, I think.

I’m still getting used to blogging for Creatures 2 in particular, and I’m a little ashamed to admit that I didn’t even know the names of the norns in this group.

The bright side to this initial confusion was that the norns stuck together in the incubation area. Of course, I was able to forgive myself for not knowing them better once I looked at their ages. Isabelle, our oldest, was just short of an hour old! Of course I didn’t know them! I hardly had any time to get to know them. For now, though, it seemed like they were content to pace around the second learning computer and the collection of dispensers I placed around them.

Some of them pressed dispensors, but most of the time, they were happier pushing the fire, hitting each other and complaining. Good old norns. It seems like they hardly changed over the first three games, at least at a surface level. I knew the changes were much deeper than that, in their programming and genetics, but it’s still fun to consider what they all have in common.

Of course, it wasn’t long til one of our norns was old enough to breed. Isabelle was now an hour and 10 minutes old, finally starting her first reproductive cycle. It was interesting to take the time to watch her experience a cycle, especially with the aid of a graph. It’s something I never took a long look at before. Katie was just behind her and then the boys, so I at least had another 20 minutes before I had to worry about babies. Basically, I didn’t have to be worried about getting swarmed, even though I considered making this into a wolfling style world.

Of course, 20 minutes eventually came and went and I had to start worrying about the eggs that would come soon. I figured Ernest would be the first father because of his 5 minute lead on Dodger, but it was really anybody’s guess.